This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, where Klaudia introduces you to 5 drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers so that you can reconnect and re-energise with your work in 2025. 

The 5th and final driver of happiness at work is Mastery.

Mastering your strengths at work is essential for achieving greater happiness and satisfaction in your career.

Klaudia speaks with Aoife O'Brien, who shares her journey from corporate dissatisfaction to creating the Happier at Work podcast and framework. They explore the importance of identifying and applying personal strengths, as well as the value of continuous learning in professional growth.

Aoife emphasizes the need to balance feelings of competency and challenge to foster mastery in one's role. With practical insights and tools for reflection, this conversation encourages listeners to take proactive steps towards leveraging their unique strengths for a more fulfilling work experience.

Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge.

This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign where I introduce you to five drivers that contribute to building more happiness and satisfaction in our careers.

For each driver, I release three short episodes where I bring you the science behind each component with some coaching questions for you to reflect on, some hands on ideas to implement in your working life, and a piece of expert advice. That's why I am here.

So happy to be today with Aoife O'Brien who is going to share her experience of how to build more mastery at work when it comes to strengths and learning at work. Welcome, Aoife.

Thank you so much, Klaudia. It's such a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited for our conversation.

Thank so ifa. First of all, shall we do a quick intro?

Absolutely. So for 20 years I worked in market research in fast moving consumer goods in lots of different places around the world. I absolutely loved it.

I loved what I did. It really ticked the boxes on a lot of the strengths that I have. But I got to a stage where I just wasn't happy at work anymore.

I left my corporate career and did a coaching qualification and a Master's in organizational behavior. And during that master's I wanted to really uncover the question of why didn't I feel happy at work?

And from that whole process, I devised my Happier at Work framework. While still doing the Master's, I set up my business Happier at Work and my podcast, also called Happier at Work.

And so for the past almost six years, I've been working with organizations around things like retention, engagement and productivity through this Happier at Work framework that I've devised.

Oh, brilliant. And what the story is from like professional, maybe dissatisfaction at work to creating something so incredible.

Because your podcast is incredible and you won an award for it the other day. One of the aspects that help us to be happier at work is that level of mastery, which it has two components.

It's about us applying the strengths at work and then us learning new skills and growing. So let's try to separate those two aspects. My first question, Aoife, is about how do we identify our strengths at work and how do we then apply them?

I think our strengths at work is not something that we talk about very much at all. If I think back to my own corporate days, we didn't ever verbalize what we thought each other's strengths were.

Certainly I don't remember anyone saying to me, oh, you're really good at that now. Someone might have come up to me and asked me questions about a specific thing, and I assume that that's why they're asking me.

And if I think of the clients that I work with as well, it's not something that we're used to like necessarily talking about our strengths at work.

And I will caveat that by saying, oftentimes our strengths are not something that is really obvious to us because it comes so easily and naturally to us. We assume that other people can do exactly the same thing as easily and naturally as we can.

The kinds of strengths that I see or the kind of ones that are good to understand a little bit more about and to talk about can be something like strategic thinker.

So someone who sees that big picture, someone who can bounce ideas around or come up with new innovations, versus someone who is quite process driven, quite detail focused.

Now, one of the parts of my happier at work framework, we talk about complimentary strengths and then putting people together whose strengths complement each other. And I think in some ways you can say that makes for a really great team because those strengths are compensated by each other.

But in other ways, you could say those two people might really frustrate each other because they can't necessarily see where the other is coming from.

But once we have a better understanding of what people's unique strengths are, then it makes it easier for people to work together with an understanding that, okay, so what you're bringing to the table is this big picture thinking. What I'm bringing to the table is how do we turn that into a reality?

For example, there are so many tools that we can use online to uncover what are my strengths? Actually? And I think sometimes it's reassuring to take those tools to see, okay, objectively speaking, what do they say my strengths are?

You can think back to when you're in school. Is there something in particular, like a subject in particular that you were good at?

You can also think about what are people asking you questions about? What are they approaching you to get your advice on, to get your input on? Is it something that. What are they saying? How do I run this in Excel?

Or how do I do that?

Which might imply that you're more of that kind of process driven, step by step, methodical thinker versus are they coming to you to bounce ideas around, to think about? What does this mean for that bigger picture? So there are lots of different ways that we can figure out. We can also ask people for feedback.

And something that I saw recently, which I thought was quite interesting was, what skill or what strength do you think that I have that I'm not using to my full capability in whatever it is that I'm doing. And this, I think it's a really important question because it's not just about your strength.

It's about what strength do I have that I'm not getting to use? What is my unrealized strength?

Love it. And it's just so many great insights there that really starts from this idea of a reflection. We need to stop and think.

As you said, maybe we don't even have enough time to pause and think about our strengths and then use certain tools. But even simple as ask, and that could be quite scary at times.

If it's focusing on strengths, then it should all be positive.

Okay, I've discovered my strengths. I know what I'm good at. I know what my contributions are. Naturally, we want to grow our strengths.

And of course, we also will have some weaknesses and things we need to develop. So my second question to you is how to keep learning and growing our skills at work.

Yeah. And I think there's a few different ways that we can look at it.

Certainly if I think back to my early career, there was very much this focus on weaknesses. We didn't really talk about stress strengths. Your strengths were taken for granted.

And then it was like, oh, and here's all of your weaknesses, which later became your quote, unquote development areas. So they just changed the language. But now I see much more of a focus on strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses at all.

There are certain things that you have to be able to do at work, but so long as you meet that minimum requirement to do that, I think the focus should be shifted over toward where do you excel? And I saw there's loads of different analogies for this as well. So if I'm an average runner and I'm running beside.

I'm trying to think of the names of some brilliant runners now.

But if they improve by 1%, their running speed or their running distance versus if I improve by 1% as an average runner, then the benefit of them improving by 1% is much greater than of me improving by just 1% as well. So it's thinking about it from that perspective and the leverage that you can get from building on strengths that you already have.

And coming back to this idea then of what are our strengths and how do we get to utilize them at work. I suppose it's first of all, we talked about understanding what are they, and then it's thinking about how am I currently using my strengths?

Am I using my strengths at work? Can I use them some more within my happier at work framework?

When I talk about mastery, I think about finding the balance between feeling in over your head where you feel like I'm not really capable of doing the job and maybe I feel like I'm inadequate or I feel like a bit of an imposter. And then at the other extreme there is I feel overqualified for this role and actually I don't feel challenged enough and I'm bored.

So it's finding the right balance between feeling capable enough and having sufficient challenge in your role. Now, how do we get to grow and develop?

We talked about identifying our strengths first of all, but then it's looking for opportunities to actually utilize those strengths in a very specific way. So are there projects that you could be involved in? Are there people that you could speak and seek out mentorship from as well?

Who is at the top of their game doing what it is that you excel at and what can you learn from them? Another huge challenge for us as well, I think is finding the time to actually do this.

I know from the people that I speak to, it's, we just don't have time to even think about this.

But I promise you, if you take a little bit of time, take 15 minutes, half an hour today, because you're listening to this today, take 15 minutes to think about what are my strengths and how can I use them a little bit more. So in which areas is there a project that I can work on, how can I use it in my day to day?

I think once we've identified that this is something that's quite unique to me, that not everyone on the team is going to have this strength and once you know that you're able to show up a little bit more confidently knowing that your strengths are unique to you and this is something that you bring to the table. Now, having said all of that, I do still believe in the power of taking that time and learning new things as well.

But I just understand that it's not always feasible to do that when we have a really hectic work life and really high pressure, high stakes roles.

So if you want to really develop those skills, how can I use my strengths and leverage the strengths I already have to make the impact that I want to have at work. I'm trying to think of some client examples where people have basically taken on side projects.

So this one lady in particular, she took on a side project that was social media because it was something she was quite interested in. She was quite extroverted, she was very knowledgeable about social media and she turned that into a role and then that role expanded into a team.

So I think don't just discount stuff because you think that will never turn into anything.

It's taking on these additional projects or seeing opportunities of things that you're actually interested in and that you can leverage your strengths to to develop in that area as well. Yeah.

Thank you so much, Yvonne.

As you said, so important to have that sweet spot between I am competent at my work and I feel good at what I'm producing and I can clearly see my strengths and be able to use them confidently. In between that, we have this idea of I'm also being challenged and I'm growing my strengths. And that is very much as a sweet spot.

If we go one way or the other, it might get quite frustrating for us when it comes to our mastery. Thank you so much. This is absolutely fantastic advice. Where can listeners find you and learn more about you? Yeah.

So because you're listening to a podcast now, I always advise people have a search for happier at work on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. You can also find me on LinkedIn. That is the place that I most frequently would be on sharing insights about happiness at work. It's Aoiferian.

A O I F E O, apostrophe B R I E N.

And do let me know where you found me, because some people can connect and they when they don't say who they are or why they're connecting, it makes it hard to accept.

Yes, brilliant. Thank you so much, Aoife, again for all the fantastic advice and definitely very much suggesting listeners to listen to the podcast.

So thank you so much again, everyone. This is the last episode in the Happiness Reset at Work campaign. I don't believe that's it. It's the end.

If you haven't signed up yet, remember to get free tickets to an online webinar that I'll be hosting in February, the Science of Happiness, how to Be Happy at Work. But again, thank you so much for listening. I dare you to be happy and thank you again.

Bye.